The rural to urban migration in China represents one of the greatest internal migrations of people in history as rural populations have moved to cities in response to growing labour demand. One major cause of the increased labour demand was the “Reform and Open Market Policy” initiated at the end of the 1970s. The policy amplified the rural to urban divide by promoting a more thoroughly market-based economy with a corresponding reduction in the importance of agricultural production and a greater emphasis on non-agricultural market sectors. As a result, a series of economic reforms have drastically changed the cultural and social aspects of the rural area over the past three decades. Many social problems have been created due to rural to urban migration. These problems include institutional discrimination because of the restrictive household registration policies; social stigmatisation and discrimination in state-owned employment sectors and among urban residents; psychological distress and feelings of alienation.
This paper presents the results of a time-series analysis of short-term changes in the conditions prevailing in regional labour markets. A set of alternative indicators of changes in these conditions are evaluated for each of the standard regions by use of quarterly data for a period that includes the rapid changes in the economy associated with the ‘Barber Boom’. Leading indicators of changes in labour demand are contrasted with lagging indicators and the findings for different regions compared. The results of the analysis show that in general the numbers of vacant jobs and the rates at which the jobs are being filled provide leading indicators of changes in the region's level of unemployment and of changes in the duration of unemployment in the region, and that there is no feedback from unemployment to change the demand for labour in the region. In consequence it would be justified to claim that changes in regional unemployment and its duration are caused by changes in the demand for labour in the region.
Innovation and unemployment are two economic elements related to each other that have been constantly analyzed in the economic debates from the beginning of the 21st century. A classical question is whether innovation creates or destroys jobs. The conventional approach contemplates innovation as a transformation instrument of an economy, resulting in economic growth and jobs creation. Another approach points out to various mechanisms which can compensate the primary effect of innovations and cause an ultimate effect of innovations on labour demand to be unclear. In view of the fact that there are many different explanations about the impact of innovations on labour demand, this paper, after the analysis of theoretical and empirical scientific literature in this field, provides an empirical analysis with unemployment as the dependent variable. The authors use data from 28 European Union countries for the period of 1992–2016 and pursue to research how technological innovations affect unemployment rate. There are two core independent variables – expenditure on R&D (research and development) and number of patent applications – as the main proxies for technological innovations. Control variables that affect unemployment are included to the model as well. The model was estimated using a dynamic two-step System Generalized Method of Moments (GMM-SYS) of a panel data system. After the composition of 12 different estimations of the model, the results suggest that, in some cases, technological innovations affect unemployment.
Educational attainment and vocational training are important components of the human capital and they both show large cross-country variation. Large differences in vocational training between countries have two major interconnected explanations. The first one deals with structural differences in technological structure of labour demand, while the second one associates incidence of on-the-job training with institutional environment fertile for high tech developments.
Efficient contracts are on the labour demand curve: Theory and facts